POP REVIEW

POP REVIEW; It's a Techno World, With Nothing to Fear From Gears and Switches

By BEN RATLIFF

Published: June 15, 1998

Perhaps there's nothing in the world so unfairly typecast as the machine. There's a classic perception that we turn to it in moments of paranoia, greed, envy, fear, self-aggrandizement. It's second nature: Love is human, hatred is enginelike; to become the perfect worker, to adopt a mind of gears and switches, is futile and dangerous.

The German electronic-music quartet Kraftwerk has devoted about 25 years to the theme of the machine, usually stressing the man-made beauty within it. The group's concert at the Hammerstein Ballroom on Saturday -- its first in New York City since 1981 -- amounted to an elegant, theatrical multimedia work. With gigantic 20th-century themes poking out from behind beautiful designs, it provided an experience that was as much like reading a novel as attending a concert.

The four band members -- including two of the founders, Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider -- stood stock still, perfectly spaced apart in a sort of ship's walkway, their synthesizers before them and their computers behind them. They were mostly triggering programmed music, but they collectively changed the hue of it as it played; a couple of spots were improvised over steady beats.

Dressed in aerodynamic, close-fitting black suits, they looked like the pit crew for a spaceship race. Initially they come off as futurist technocrats. But there's a powerful subtext in Kraftwerk's songs that explores the point where man connects with machine, and not the other way around. The syntax of their songs, written like road signs, with a vocabulary of internationally intelligible words, is careful with this distinction: Mr. Hutter, through a headset microphone, sang in his light monotone about the ''Man Machine,'' not the ''Machine Man.'' With black-and-white clips from industrial films and advertising, and song lyrics flashed in Constructivist lettering, the show wasn't necessarily about ''newer is better''; rather, the band's esthetic reviewed some of the greatest design impulses of the 20th century, even if many of them were older than the 50-ish band members themselves.

The sold-out crowd -- racially, sexually, generationally mixed -- exploded even at the annunciatory beats of ''Numbers,'' ''Man Machine'' and ''Trans-Europe Express.'' These rhythms were the stirrings of several generations of youth, known not just through Kraftwerk but through the early-80's hip-hop and New Wave records that borrowed them, and the newer techno that has pervaded with this motorized pulse.

Everything else aside -- the animated Constructivist and de Stijlist graphics, the subtle lighting, the rarity of the spectacle -- the music, at sternum-rattling levels, sounded breathtaking. The old songs were newly (digitally) programmed for the tour, with Mr. Schneider continually altering the sound and weight of the programmed beats, and there were two new pieces, melodically narrow, unremarkable techno that nevertheless sounded gorgeous through the well-mixed system.

The visuals, designed by the band, were a crucial part of the concert; in retrospect, it's hard to understand the band without them. ''Tour de France'' used old black-and-white clips of the bicycle race, with fluorescent lights in the French tricolor illuminating the stage. For ''Autobahn,'' old magazine advertisements for Mercedes and Volkwagens were given lovingly close panning shots. And in ''Trans-Europe Express'' (whose beat was the basis for Afrika Bambaata's ''Planet Rock''), a color film at least 30 years old showed the train -- an unprepossessing hulk, nothing like the recent high-speed jobs -- heroically breaking through landscapes like a mechanical ambassador.

As an encore, the curtains opened to a stage empty of musicians; on screen, we saw plastic-head representations of the band, stuck on dull gray torsos with mechanical arms and metal-rod legs. ''We are the robots,'' flashed the lyrics. ''We are programmed/just to do/anything you want us to.'' The screens lifted, and there they were: the robots. But, significantly, they didn't move in the popping spurts that robots are famous for; they swiveled and moved their arms slowly, thoughtfully, humanly, as if practicing tai chi.

During the closing number, a new techno piece, you knew the band members wouldn't wave to the crowd when they left the stage one by one, just as you knew they wouldn't talk in between songs, or even adjust a microphone. But they did smile, slightly.